'Emily-No Prisoner Be' Premiere And Tour

This fall, Joyce DiDonato tours the brand-new song cycle Emily – No Prisoner Be, composed by Kevin Puts specifically for her and the string trio Time for Three. The work sets 24 of Dickinson’s most celebrated poems to music, including “Hope is the thing with feathers,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.”

Joyce DiDonato has long captivated opera audiences with her warm tone and remarkable expressive power. The New Yorker has described her as “perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation,” while The New York Times has hailed her voice as “nothing less than 24-carat gold.” Joining her is the award-winning trio Time for Three—Ranaan Meyer, Nicolas Kendall, and Charles Yang—renowned for a genre-defying style that blends strings and vocals into a seamless fusion of classical, Americana, and contemporary chamber music.

Emily – No Prisoner Be portrays a poet who refused to be constrained, celebrating an inner voice that insists on being heard. Commissioned by the Bregenz Festival, the work received its world premiere there in 2025.

The tour will begin August 19 at the Oslo Opera House, and stop in Bochum on August 21-23, La Jolle on October 8, and Houston on October 13.

We need you to make us feel an integral PART of a shared existence through the communal, universal, forgiving language of music, of dance, of poetry and Art – so that we never lose sight of the fact that we are all in this together and that we are all deserving of a life that overflows with immense possibility, improbable beauty and relentless truth.

Joyce DiDonato